Alex Schultz: APIs

Skype Users on Christmas Day

The above graph uses my little program on randomdomainname.co.uk to show the number of skype users online over christmas day by hour of the day. The blue line is Christmas day and the red line is Christmas eve. The hour of the day is given in GMT and the whole program is built by sampling skype's feed of users online, which they expose on their homepage, once an hour. I don't vouch that it is 100% accurate of course but I think it's a very interesting graph to see to give an indication of the % of people who have their computers on or are online on Christmas day at all. I certainly was one of the peak 6million or so people online on Christmas day even though I didn't actually do any Skyping.

Getting better at packing for work

Preparing for my trip on work to our office in Madrid spain I was pretty pleased with myself. The picture to the left shows my entire kit for travel at 5am on the day I was leaving. This will cover me for working one week and two weeks of holiday for Christmas.

One roller bag, one camera bag and one laptop style bag with my laptop, power adaptors, 4 notepads and a folder with work and travel agenda's in it.

Getting on top of knowing how to travel is something I guess no one ever gets completely nailed but this is the first trip where I have felt really pleased that I know what I am doing.

In 2006 I have flown 15times for work and I am pretty sure I will be doing that again if not more next year. It's been a great experience for 2006 and I am pretty sure I will enjoy it more in 2007.

First Payment from Revver $$$

So I have banged on a little about how good revver is and the fact that they pay me for adding value to them as a user of their video service embedding their videos in my website. From experience of using many advertising networks over time nothing is actually worthwhile until you really get paid. Today I received my first payment from Revver:

Revver pay me through paypal and although the payment is only $30.38 of the $400 they owe for last month me at least they are paying me. This is a very good sign. I will of course update if they don't pay me everything they owe me but I am pretty pleased with how it is going. Below are my current Revver standings.

As I always say... revver is awesome and I am pretty excited I have been paid.

Starting To Promote the Widget

Today I made a change to the cocktail making widget I have blogged about a couple of times. I added a link at the bottom saying "get this on your blog" and linking back to the widget generation page. We will see how that does in trying to convince people to add this widget to their blog. I am pretty excited about the potential though, one month in and a couple of large blogs have started using the widget (most notably get real denver) which means the widget is now at well over 10 000 views a day. I was thinking if I could convince just 2 of those viewers daily (0.02% of those who see the widget) to install the widget I could hit 1000 blogs in a year (with the blogs already signed up and not taking into account the exponential growth potential).

I am going to be really interested to see how this experiment grows and am already wondering what I can make my next experiment do!!!